


Perchance to Dream

by PeniG



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Caring Crowley (Good Omens), Dreams, Old traumas, Other, Protective Crowley (Good Omens), Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:59:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23771203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: Aziraphale is worn out from being an angel in a pandemic. Crowley wants him to sleep, but he's afraid he can't. Or is that, afraid he will?
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 142





	Perchance to Dream

**Author's Note:**

> “Sigh No More, Ladies” is from Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare; though we don’t actually know whether he wrote his own songs. Crowley’s Gaelic song is derived from “The Devil’s Tribute to Moling,” translated by Kuno Meyer, in Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry, Constable & Company, Ltd., 1911. “Stonewall Girls” was sung at the riot by an impromptu Rockette-style chorus line, a tactic more protesters should have imitated by now.
> 
> Just a cozy bit of silliness in this uncertain world, really. Sleep is a skill I don't have, either; but dreaming is another matter.

“I know what you’re doing,” said Aziraphale, as Crowley flexed his foot between his hands one last time before setting it gently down on the duvet.

“S’not like it’s a secret. If you wouldn’t overdo your self-imposed pestilence duty I wouldn’t have to take care of you so much.” Crowley slunk up Aziraphale’s body and tapped him between the shoulderblades. “Bring your wings out. Let me see what kind of a mess you’ve gotten them into.”

Resisting was too much work. Aziraphale shrugged and his wings rustled into the material plane, in deep rich blue because Screw Regulations decreeing that principalities should have white feathers. “Four-course meal, whirlpool bubble bath, massage, and now preening? You’ll be singing me a lullaby next.”

“You wouldn’t like my lullabies. Too gory.” Aziraphale heard him open the drawer where he kept his grooming quills, and felt his deft long hand pass over coverts, alula, carpal edge, primaries, secondaries, and tertials, like a barber’s comb making its first evaluating pass through hair. “Not that it would hurt anything if you fell asleep. You’ve watched over me when I did it often enough. Time you gave me a taste of my own medicine.”

“I’m not opposed to it in principle.” Aziraphale shifted the pillow, which was trying to drown him, or at least his voice. “But you’re so invested in the idea. I don’t want you to feel you’ve failed if I can’t do it.”

“Of course you can do it. You promised you would.”

“I promised I’d try! I don’t know _how_!”

“There’s nothing to know. Now’s the perfect time. The pandemic has you worn out.”

“I’ve been worn out plenty of times.” He’d been worn nearly to discorporation the only time he’d slept, dropped off in the Andes after riding out the Flood and getting a stiff lecture from Gabriel about exceeding his instructions. Sleep had done nothing, then, but take him straight back into the teeming waters, striving and failing and failing and failing to comfort the dying as they dragged him down; and he’d never bothered since. Of course Crowley would monitor him for nightmares, now, but - “It’s not that simple, dearest. Not for me.” 

He had so much _more_ nightmare fodder stored in his brain, these days, than he'd had after the Flood.

“If you say so.” The bed shifted with Crowley's weight as he positioned himself, settling one wing across his lap. “At least you’re resting.”

“Exactly. I’m very comfortable, thank you, so don’t worry about the sleeping.”

 _“I’m_ not the one who worries, here. If you don’t sleep, you don’t. No skin off my nose. Do me a favor, though? Close your eyes, so I don’t have to worry about where I direct the light?”

“Could you _be_ any more transparent?” Aziraphale obeyed, closing all his eyes in all his dimensions. Crowley always did what Aziraphale wanted (when Aziraphale would let him). Refusing to do what he wanted was churlish. But of course he _wasn’t_ refusing. He was only _failing_. “You can sing lullabies if you want to. Or bebop, or whatever you like. You don’t sing often enough. But don’t be disappointed when I don’t fall asleep. That’s all I’m concerned about.” Mostly.

Crowley started preening at the bend of the wing. “I’m harder to disappoint than you think I am, and I don’t have as much ego invested in boring you senseless as you think I do. Hold still! Are you sensitive right there? Are you hurt?”

“No, no, you hit an itch I hadn’t realized I had, that’s all. It feels lovely." Aziraphale sighed luxuriously into the pillow. "You spoil me, dear! You must let me return the favor, and preen you when you’re done.”

“Sure thing.”

For a little while the room was quiet, by London standards, the late night quarantine traffic barely penetrating the flat’s double glazing. All Aziraphale’s sensory apparatus focused on the gentle touch of the quill and the hands, Crowley’s knees supporting the wing, the decadently comfortable nest of Crowley’s - _their_ \- mattress and bedding supporting and snuggling the rest of him. Humans suffered, out there, while he was in here being lazy and cosseted...no. No. No. He couldn’t help anyone, exhausted, and no amount of pushing himself would enable him to help everyone. Crowley moved on from the alula to the primary coverts, singing, softly, in an ancient Mesopotamian dialect. “ _The goat went up the hillside, the goat went up the hillside -“_

Aziraphale groaned and laughed. Crowley rapped him on the shoulder. “Oi! Hold still!”

“Circular songs are cheating,” said Aziraphale.

“It’s not a contest, so I don’t see how I can cheat,” said Crowley. “But all right, if you don’t like that one, I’ve got more. _Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more, men were deceivers ever -“_

Aziraphale wiggled, earning another rap on the shoulder, and sang along, into the pillow, original pronunciation and that sweet little air the Globe’s house musician had tossed off so casually for Will to catch and make lyrics for: “ _One foot on sea and one on shore, to one thing constant never. Then sigh not so, but let them go and be you blithe and bonny, converting all your sounds of woe into hey, nonny, nonny.”_

They sang a few more of the songs from those days, not just from Shakespeare but from other productions of other plays, known now only to dedicated drama scholars and them, and sometimes, reaching further and further back in time, only to them. Singing into the pillow was work, and Aziraphale liked to hear Crowley’s voice, its original angelic purity roughened by the trauma of his Fall and then polished and humanized by use and time. As the quill picked through the primaries, the voice picked its way through something in seventh or eighth century Gaelic, with a heavy Scots accent, though the tune was Irish:

_He is pure gold, he is the sky around the sun,_   
_He is a vessel of silver with wine,_   
_He is an angel, he is holy wisdom,_   
_Whose will is stronger than the words of kings._

_He is a fragrant branch with its blossoms,_   
_He is a vessel full of honey,_   
_He is a precious stone with its virtue,_   
_Whose love is better than Heaven._

_He’s leaving out half the verses,_ Aziraphale thought, remembering vaguely that this was related somehow to St. Moling’s temptation by a demon (not Crowley; this was well after Patrick closed Ireland to him) and that another man should be described, too, who was a bird in a snare, a leaky vessel in a rough sea; and the pure gold man was supposed to be so because of his obedience to the Will of Heaven; but _that_ wasn’t something Crowley would sing about.

_He is an altar on which wine is dealt,_   
_Round which a multitude of melodies is sung,_   
_He is a cleansed chalice with liquor,_   
_He is fair white bronze, he is gold._

“You can’t just change a song up to suit you, dearest,” Aziraphale says, trimming the sail as they fly before the wind across the chill sloppy waves of the Irish Sea. Inside the bubble of radiance around the little boat they are warm, Crowley curled on fleeces in the bottom and watching him with lazy golden eyes.

“Sure I can,” says Crowley. “Humans do it all the time.” He throws his head back, red hair shining against the overcast sky, and belts out, to the tune of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” _We are the Stonewall girls! We wear our hair in curls! We always dress with flair, we wear clean underwear! We wear our dungarees above our nelly knees!_

Aziraphale laughs, but he is nervous all the same. “That’s humans. Not us.”

“It is now.”

“We have to report in.”

“Nope,” declares Crowley, laying down the law to the Universe. “We’re going around the world together.”

Aziraphale wrings his hands, even though they’re on the tiller. “They won’t _let_ us!”

“They can’t _stop_ us!” But Crowley, facing him, grinning at him, can’t see the archangels rising out of the sea behind him, Gabriel smiling and Michael scowling. “We’re on our own side now,” says Crowley, as the vast archangel wings, Gabriel’s white and speckled like a gyrfalcon’s, Michael’s barred and banded like a hawk’s, spread dripping across the sky. Aziraphale tries to hurl himself forward, to wrap himself around Crowley and protect him from what’s coming, but he can’t move, his hands locking around the tiller as the wings beat air and water into a huge wave that swamps the boat.

The wave drives him down, straight down, into brown Flood waters swarming with the condemned, innocent and guilty alike struggling, their hands grasping, their eyes pleading. He swims into their midst, reaching for them with hands and wings and Grace and will, trying to take their suffering into himself and grant them peace as they die, but there are too many of them, clutching at his coat, dragging him down, dissolving into salt faster than he can bless or comfort them. Sappho is there, and Oscar, and Eve, and Warlock, and Miss Pepper, and a one-eyed woman who brewed the best beer in Lombardy, all drowning -

A sinuous darkness passes above him, and he and his charges are all swept, willy-nilly, into the net Crowley’s snake form drags behind him. They whirl through the water, and then through the air, and now spill out into the long grass of a hill hovering between the rugged heights of the Andes and the churning depths of the Pacific. He tucks and rolls across the ground as the children spill forth from the arks Crowley tempted them into building to scatter, laughing, in all directions. The air smells like roasting guinea pig, maize, chilis, and potatoes. Dancing Hummingbird, the woman who pulled him out of a snowdrift and taught him how life worked in this area, claps her hands when she sees him. “Llama Man!” She never could pronounce “Aziraphale,” and he can’t deny that his hair resembles a llama’s tolerably well. Her face is a mesh of laugh lines.

Harry, his manicurist, recaptures her hands as Aziraphale kisses her in greeting. “Stop waving them around, you’ll get the polish everywhere,” he says to her, then tuts at him. “You’ve let your hands go all to pot. I’ll do yours next.”

“It’s the quarantine,” Aziraphale explains, feeling drab in his worn waistcoat next to their vibrantly-dyed ponchos. “No barbershops open. You’re looking very well. Both of you.” Wonderfully well! The last time he saw Harry, he was dying of the complications of AIDS; and he had reached Dancing Hummingbird too long after the rockslide to be of any help. He’d had to do most of his guardian duties in the big settlements on the rivers, and been lucky to hear of the accident in time to be on hand to ease her passing.

It seems gauche to mention these matters, but Harry had always been sharp. “Plenty of time,” he says. “I won’t even be born for thousands of years, so _obviously_ I’m not dead yet.”

“You mind Baby Jesus and think about what color polish you want.” Dancing Hummingbird points him toward the manger with her chin. Baby Jesus’s manger is stuffed with sweet timothy hay, covered with a bright red llama fleece blanket, and hung about with charms from every culture Aziraphale can remember. He smiles up at Aziraphale, glowing. “Such a good baby,” coos Dancing Hummingbird, as Harry repairs the cobalt polish she damaged clapping her hands. “And the halo’s so handy at night.”

“You can’t use baby Jesus for a nightlight,” protests Gabriel, breaking in through the wall of the farmhouse. He flaming sword gutters in the savage wind he brings with him, reeking of sulfur. 

Aziraphale leaps to spread his wings between the archangel and the humans, and Crowley surges out from under the manger, half-serpent and half-demon, striking and striking and striking until Gabriel’s face is a mass of snakebites around a death’s head grin. Crowley pushes him off the top of the Matterhorn, which Aziraphale recognizes from pictures (he himself had never done anything as pointlessly strenuous as summit a mountain in his existence; he has climbed them exactly as far as necessary to do his duty, and not one inch farther), and the archangel falls, slowly, spinning in circles, reminding Aziraphale of someone he saw fall in a film once. A Hitchcock, perhaps? “Good riddance,” says Crowley, taking Aziraphale’s hand and bowing over it, very natty in black knee breeches. “You don’t have to deal with him any more, angel. Never ever again.”

“I know that, dearest,” Aziraphale says, mentally totting up all the incongruities of the last little while, and finally putting them together. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”

“Dream, or real life, I’m not letting that bastard near you.” Far, far below, Gabriel impacts the ground. Crowley snaps his fingers and sends an avalanche of snow and boulders down on top of him.

Aziraphale laughs, and kisses him. “We should fly! Anathema says if you know you’re dreaming, you can control the dream, so there’s no danger.”

“Not even a little?” Crowley asks. “I can’t rescue you if there’s no danger.”

“Well, perhaps we can have a _tiny_ bit of danger, then.”

From that point, the dream is great fun. They fly, holding hands, over vast beautiful land and seascapes. They dine in Venice, where they’ve never both been at the same time, at the height of the Renaissance; and Aziraphale can taste every bite. They visit people Aziraphale hasn’t seen in forever, introducing Leonardo to Oscar, Miss Woolf to Sappho, Virgil and Dante to the _Beowulf_ poets, Brother Gunnar and Brother Peter. When he loses track of the fact that he’s dreaming and Gabriel pops up threatening to ruin everything Crowley takes care of it, mowing him down with the Bentley, cutting him to pieces with his own flaming sword, and entombing him in pyramids built of rubber ducks; whereupon Aziraphale remembers that he’s dreaming, and that Gabriel is nothing to him anymore but a persistent lie, a parasitic voice in his head with no more power than he allows it to have. “You really are my hero,” says Aziraphale, floating upward on a wave of light.

“I really am,” said Crowley, ears turning red, grin faintly lit from the side by the glow of his laptop’s screen as he looks down at Aziraphale, snuggled into his hip, covered by a warm black wing. “So. I take it I did all right on nightmare duty?”

“Superlatively,” Azirphale assured him, stretching.

“And how do you like sleeping, now that you’ve given it a fair shot?”

Aziraphale considered; but the state melted in his awareness like candy floss on his tongue. “I like dreaming. Especially the parts when I was lucid and could do whatever I wanted. But the memory of it’s shredding to pieces already.”

“Yeah, they do that. Tell me about it, or write it down, and you’ll be able to hang onto more of it; otherwise it’ll all be gone in a few hours.”

“All right.” Aziraphale sat up. He felt much, much better; all the weary heaviness of being an angel during a pestilence gone. Crowley’s wing, however, was (by Crowley’s standards) badly mussed. “Hand me a quill and I’ll tell you what I can while I preen you. I see I’ve made a terrible mess.”

“Oh, s’not that bad. You don’t need -“

Aziraphale batted his eyes.

Crowley groaned happily, shut the laptop, and fished in the nightstand drawer. “All right, all right. Anything for a quiet life.” He handed over a quill, trimmed just right for fixing up the displaced underwing coverts and secondaries.

Aziraphale took it, fluttering his eyelashes and smiling in thanks, and set to work. “Well! First of all. Did you sing 'Stonewall Girls,' or did I make that up?”

-30-


End file.
